Museum plans exhibit on Auschwitz oven-makers

3rd June 2005, 0 comments

3 June 2005, BERLIN - Berlin's Jewish Museum on Friday announced plans to stage an exhibition about the German company which designed and helped to build the ovens used in the Nazi death camps during World War Two.

3 June 2005

BERLIN - Berlin's Jewish Museum on Friday announced plans to stage an exhibition about the German company which designed and helped to build the ovens used in the Nazi death camps during World War Two.

The museum said the exhibition, organised jointly with the Auschwitz Museum and two Holocaust memorial sites at Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dorau, will run 19 June - 18 September.

The exhibition, entitled 'Technicians of the Final Solution', will examine the role of the Erfurt company Topf & Soehne (Topf and Sons) which developed the special crematorium facilities for Buchenwald and other camps.

"Topf & Soehne was a perfectly normal German industrial enterprise - until it became a business partner to the SS," the Jewish Museum said in describing the exhibition.

"Initially for Buchenwald and then also for other concentration camps, the company produced ovens specifically for burning corpses tailored to the requirements of the SS," it said.

The company also designed the ventilation systems for the gas chambers while also striving "to give the SS the best advice on the construction of the death factories", the museum said.

Remnants of ovens from Auschwitz will be displayed in the exhibition, which will address the question of how a civilian company could permit itself to be engaged by the SS to build facilities designed to wipe out human life.

The central issue is the "moral and inhuman indifference" on the part of the Topf company employees in knowingly assisting in the genocide, the museum said.

After Berlin, the exhibition, subtitled 'Topf & Soehne - The Oven Builders for Auschwitz' - is also to be shown in Erfurt, Buchenwald and Auschwitz.